Connecting the Insights Dots
Mastering analytical and technical skills is paramount for an insights professional. Developing business acumen and becoming a strategic thinker, cultivating an insights-driven mindset, enhancing your influencer abilities—the list of skills could go on.
Certainly, there’s also a major shift happening in consumer insights functions today, with the growth of AI systems. Now, the insights pro is tasked with becoming fluent in AI, while integrating human intelligence and oversight to provide a mix of collaborative collective intelligence.
While there is no shortage of soft or hard skills to master in becoming an insight professional, we took a look at several blogs from consultants, which carried similar themes about how insights in the future might play out. Zappi also examined these themes, in its blog, “The skills insights professionals need to succeed in the future.” As the company relates, times have been changing: “From embracing the era of AI to ensuring data and insights run through organizations like a stream to fuel decisions, there’s a major shift in how insights teams of today function.”
Of course, it’s not just about individual skills, it’s also about team skills. The whole team may be greater than the individual parts, for example. Zappi further honed it down to six future skills your insights team needs to succeed:
- Curiosity: As the world of tech and ways of working continue to change, you need team members who maintain a relentless curiosity. These are people whose curiosity is a part of them. The ones who have a strong desire to understand and are always open to learn more about what’s going on around them and in the minds of the consumer.
- Growth mindset: Going hand in hand with curiosity, you also need people on your team who have a growth mindset and thrive on change. These team members can best be described as people who always want to develop their skills, have a desire to discover and experiment, who learn from their mistakes and share these learnings with others. And because they embrace new challenges and learn new things, they are very flexible and adapt to the situations around them.
- Ability to influence: As of today, organizations have embraced autonomy and democratized decision-making. But in order for consumer insights to continue informing and driving decisions it too needs to be democratized. In the future, democratization of insights will be the norm. In this future, insights teams will not own the data or run all the consumer research themselves. Instead, they will use their research and analytical skills to look across large volumes of data to pull aggregate learnings and provide insights to inform the big strategic decisions that can make the whole organization smarter.
- Empathy: Empathy will play a huge role in the future of insights. When insights teams don’t run all the research themselves, they’ll need to help others in the organization have empathy for the consumer and help them make the right decisions from the data — generating empathy supported by data.
- Ability to connect the dots: The importance of data to a researcher is undeniable. The best insights professionals of the future know not just how to source good data, but also how to use it effectively to tell the right consumer story.
- Business acumen: Lastly, you’ll need everyone on your team who can apply all the skill sets previously listed to be keeping the business top of mind. You want insight professionals who are willing to work to understand what’s going on both inside and outside of insights —which includes understanding the consumer, the industry, as well as the business, its realities, objectives and challenges.
Diving Deep into the Insights Ocean
During TMRE 2025, Daymond John, one of the stars at ABC’s “Shark Tank,” will be on hand to give the keynote, “How To Be An Insights Shark.”
From FUBU to Shark Tank and countless ventures in between, Daymond John’s phenomenal entrepreneurial journey has spanned more than 25 years. In this dynamic presentation, Daymond breaks down the core tenets of his success, which he has distilled into tangible takeaways that he calls his five S.H.A.R.K. points.
You will leave this inspiring keynote feeling empowered to sell an idea and gain stakeholder buy-in while discovering ways to seamlessly connect your brand to its consumers. Your organizational pool can sometimes feel deep, so get ready to dive in as an insights shark and deliver material impact to your business.
Taking a Leadership Role
As Zappi outlined in its blog, your team should be made up of insights professionals who maintain a relentless curiosity, thrive on change, have a profound ability to influence, are empathetic, and use consumer data effectively to impact the business in ways that are meaningful. Simple, right? Yet, there is always work to be done to strive toward these traits, strengthening the ones you have and improving on the ones you don’t.
Whether each individual leans towards the hard or soft skills, it’s “about taking those first few steps to start the journey of building out their skills and opportunities now with this future in mind,” as Zappi notes. Honing your leadership skills for your team and to guide them on this journey is also important. Elevating your skills also helps elevate the team around you. Finally, identifying the gaps in your team’s skills can help fill and train for those missing skills in the future.
As Zappi puts it, “Guide your team to flourish in the new age of insights. Lead your teams to understand the business, lean into new technology, encourage them to be curious and empathetic, channel their analytical thinking and focus on getting relevant consumer insights into the right hands at the right time.”
Video courtesy of Bernard Marr
